Azure Solutions Architect Expert · 18% of the exam

Design business continuity solutions: free practice questions

5 sample questions from our 14-question bank for this domain — answers and explanations included. These are the same scenario-based style as the real Azure exam.

1. For blob data, a design must ensure the data is readable from a secondary region even while the primary region is available, to serve read traffic and improve resilience. Which redundancy option should the architect recommend?

  • A. Read-access geo-redundant storage (RA-GRS) or RA-GZRS✓ Correct
  • B. Locally redundant storage (LRS)
  • C. Zone-redundant storage (ZRS) only
  • D. No redundancy
Explanation

RA-GRS (or RA-GZRS) adds read access to the geo-replicated secondary copy, so applications can read from the secondary region even before a failover. LRS (B) is single-datacenter, ZRS (C) has no secondary region to read from, and no redundancy (D) fails the requirement.

2. A business requires that if the primary Azure region fails, VM-based workloads resume in a secondary region within 2 hours (RTO) with at most 15 minutes of data loss (RPO). Which service should the architect recommend for orchestrated failover?

  • A. Azure Site Recovery (replicating VMs to a secondary region)✓ Correct
  • B. Azure Backup with weekly backups only
  • C. Availability zones within the primary region
  • D. A resource lock on the VMs
Explanation

Azure Site Recovery continuously replicates VMs to a secondary region and orchestrates failover, meeting cross-region RTO/RPO objectives. Weekly Azure Backup (B) can't meet a 15-minute RPO, availability zones (C) don't protect against a full regional failure, and a resource lock (D) is unrelated to DR.

3. A stateless web tier must automatically maintain a minimum number of healthy instances and replace failed ones, spread across zones, to meet a high-availability SLA. Which compute design should the architect recommend?

  • A. A zone-redundant Virtual Machine Scale Set behind a load balancer with health probes✓ Correct
  • B. A single VM with a resource lock
  • C. A manually managed pair of VMs in one zone
  • D. Azure Functions consumption plan with no scaling rules
Explanation

A zone-redundant VM Scale Set with a load balancer and health probes maintains a minimum healthy instance count, auto-replaces unhealthy instances, and spreads across zones for HA. A single VM (B) is a single point of failure, a manual single-zone pair (C) lacks zone resilience and autoscaling, and while Functions can work for some apps, it doesn't match a VM-based scale-set HA requirement here.

4. An architect must design for both high availability AND disaster recovery for a tier-1 application. Which combination BEST reflects sound design?

  • A. Availability zones for in-region HA plus cross-region replication/failover for DR✓ Correct
  • B. Only a single-zone deployment with nightly backups
  • C. Only cross-region replication with no in-region redundancy
  • D. Only a resource lock to prevent deletion
Explanation

Robust tier-1 design layers in-region HA (availability zones) with cross-region DR (replication/failover) to handle both datacenter and regional failures. A single zone with backups (B) lacks HA and fast DR, cross-region only (C) leaves in-region failures to full failover, and a lock (D) addresses neither HA nor DR.

5. A relational database must tolerate the loss of a single availability zone with zero data loss and automatic failover within the same region. Which Azure SQL Database configuration should the architect recommend?

  • A. Zone-redundant configuration (Business Critical / Premium with zone redundancy)✓ Correct
  • B. A single-zone Basic tier database
  • C. Geo-replication to another continent only
  • D. Manual export to a BACPAC file nightly
Explanation

A zone-redundant Azure SQL Database keeps synchronous replicas across availability zones in the region, surviving a zone loss with automatic failover and no data loss. A single-zone Basic tier (B) has no zone resilience, cross-continent geo-replication (C) is for regional DR (async, potential data loss), and nightly BACPAC exports (D) risk a day of data loss.

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Design business continuity solutions — Free Azure Solutions Architect Expert Practice Questions | DataCertPrep — Certification Prep